Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
tons of servants, and lived in a great house with four floors and five
Western toilets on Rue Massenet.’
“What? Massenet? You know what I was thinking! So next I asked
her, ‘What did your father do?’ And she said with a proud smile: ‘He
owned a big department store called Honesty, a very famous one. It
doesn’t exist anymore, but in the old heydays it made money faster
than you could stuff it in your pants.’
“I looked hard in her lying eyes, and I said, ‘What’s your father’s
name?’ I knew that a person of her type wouldn’t lie about that for
fear her ancestors would strike her dead. Sure enough, she said,
‘Luo.’ And I said, ‘So you’re the daughter of Gatekeeper Luo, the in­
fected leech who stole our family’s gold and jewels!’ You should have
seen how round her eyes and mouth grew. She began to wail and said
her father had been killed because a few of those jewels were found
in the lining of his jacket. (I wrote to you about this, do you remem­
ber?) She went on to say that the Red Army took him and the gold,
and she next saw him in a cart being brought to the stadium field,
with words of condemnation written on a board tied to his back,
and a blindfold that had slipped down so that you could see his
frightened eyes. After he was shot, the family buried the other valu­
ables. But when the great famine came, they took their chances. One
by one, they sold the pieces. One by one, a family member died for
having the valuables. ‘No one cares what imperialist things we have
now,’ the crying woman said, and she was selling the last few pieces,
because she didn’t want the curse to get her son.
“I said it was ghosts who demanded she give the valuables back to
the family they were stolen from. That was the only way to get rid of
the curse. So that was how I retrieved these trinkets for you. Clever,
no? They’re just a few souvenirs from your family’s past. Nothing
that valuable, but perhaps they will give you pleasure as you think
about those days again....”
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